Every week with increasing volume tells us this: higher education is in trouble. It is too expensive. There aren’t enough students to go around. Schools are going to close. And those that remain will be different from what they were before. People aren’t sure they should spend four years of their life learning things they can’t apply to jobs that might not be there when they’re done.

Higher ed is beset by political turmoil, disrupted by technological change, threatened by rising income inequality, peering over the edge of a ‘demographic cliff’, and looking ahead at the uncertainty of climate change. To survive we need to change. And the changes we need to make are hard. But at Brandeis we have a chance to make sure they don’t change what makes us special. What makes us different is exactly what makes us the best place to lead this change

Stories

Let me tell you a story.

I grew up on a dirt road in southern Maine. I only applied to schools in the Boston area and included Brandeis because the only teacher at my high school with a PhD went there. I never saw Brandeis before I moved in. I didn’t know a thing about its faculty or reputation apart from its ranking and a tradition of being pretty liberal, and a little bit weird. (I had read Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book before high school and imagined a campus populated by protestors and poets.) 

I knew I loved literature and the classics before I arrived on campus and from the first day until the last my teachers brought me into their world. Whether it was in a poetry seminar, a funded mentoring program for students interested in a career in education, or my independent research for my senior thesis, I found faculty who were serious about their work, but wanted to bring students into it too.

The training I received in and out of the classroom and the mentoring that continued after I graduated changed the way I saw the worlds What I didn’t realize at the time was that Brandeis was—and is—special: it offered me the small classrooms and faculty access typical of a liberal arts school along with the world-class research opportunities of an R1 institution. That combination of access and expertise changed my life. 

Let me tell you another story.

I met my wife, Shahnaaz, in our third week at Brandeis. She grew up in Connecticut after her family immigrated from India when she was 4. In her first semester at Brandeis, she was enrolled in four languages and had vague ideas of wanting to go into advertising or business. She thought about transferring that first year because she couldn’t make sense of what she’d do afterwards.

But then she rediscovered art. She took printmaking and painting and turned her love for languages into a linguistics major. But our experience went beyond the classroom. Shahnaaz got experience working on campus, learning graphic design and marketing in the communications office, and her way around the office as a work study student in Rosenstiel basic sciences. We started a literary art magazine our junior year.

At first, Brandeis didn’t give Shahnaaz a career. We moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and she tried real estate and teaching, even getting accepted into Teach for America before she decided, much to both of our surprise, that she wanted to be a dentist. She went back to school and proceeded to ace every science and math requirement she had avoided as an undergraduate: the variety of courses she took at Brandeis had taught her how to learn.

Shahnaaz got into every dental school she applied to, thanks to her grades, majors that set her apart from other applications, and the quality of her undergraduate diploma. Her ability to speak across disciplines and perspectives was crucial to her success: She went to Columbia, joined the Army to pay for it, and is now a pediatric dentist with practices in Haverhill and Peabody.

Shahnaaz and I benefited from the best that Brandeis had to offer: the invigorating, yet supportive intimacy of a small liberal arts college with access to world-class expertise. We learned how to learn in our classrooms, but also developed skills in our campus jobs, and crucial experience of our own in research projects like our senior theses. We built relationships with mentors who guided us years after we graduated and friendships we maintain to this very day. And we pursued careers that were more than jobs, grounded in a commitment to others and public service.

The Need to Re-imagine

This unique combination of size and knowledge, empowered by a historical mission of accessibility, a commitment to excellence, and a dedication to healing the world makes Brandeis special, not the academic reporting structure or our budget model. The problem is that what makes us special isn’t visible enough, that the students and parents of today can’t see clearly all that we have to offer. And we haven’t been able to offer it to every student.

The liberal arts provides students with the knowledge and skills to adapt in an unpredictable world. But given its high cost and the unpredictable economy of a digital and globalized world, too many have lost faith in this promise. So, we need to show them the way. We need to adapt and offer a clearer view of how our degrees provide students with the skills they need for today and tomorrow. We need to restructure to make sure that every student who comes here has the chance to learn our academic disciplines and their applications. We need to anticipate what they will need to face a changing world and lead higher education in updating the liberal arts for the 21st century.

We have the expertise and the human resources to do this: across campus we have internationally known scholars in every discipline; we have phenomenal teachers; we have cutting edge research that produces scholars like those who laid the foundation for the COVID19 vaccine. Our graduates are business executives, artists, lawyers, doctors, activists, teachers, and more. They are out there healing the world on a daily basis because they started here.

President Levine’s proposed reorganization makes what we do more visible, but it also puts our academic and professional programs in conversation and invites all of us to look out into the world to see how we can shape it. Each of the new units will be positioned to offer new programs and degrees that will attract new students and we will offer new credentials that makes their skills and experiences legible to the world. We will streamline academic leadership with a focus on designing and supporting new programs. We will provide the new institution with the structure to reward increased enrollment and innovation, to reinvest in thriving programs and to take the time to reinvent those that continue to inspire us.

Our vision of the future is one where Brandeis leads by example, where we have redefined what a school our size can do, and where we continue to live by the mission of our founding: to bring education and learning to those who have been excluded, to seek the truth in all of its form, and to produce research and people dedicated to making the world better for everyone.